Chapter 13

Analyzing the Numbers for Maximum Performance

In This Chapter

  • Mining for gold in campaigns and ad groups
  • Separating gold from fool's gold using dimensions
  • Discovering hidden gems in the Display network
  • Managing your account in minutes per month

After an AdWords account is humming along and doing okay, it's natural to want to just forget about it and spend your time on other things. Generally, this is a bad idea. Because AdWords is so competitive, standing still is the same as going backward. Bid prices increase, margins erode, positions slip, ads get stale; it's not a pretty story.

Try to keep working on AdWords from both the right- and left-brain perspectives. Right-brain (creative) activities focus on getting in the minds of your prospects and developing ever-more-effective messages and offers and sales processes. Left-brain (analytical) activities involve filtering, sorting, and parsing the huge amounts of data generated by your AdWords account to find and expand the profitable parts and shrink or eliminate the bits that are costing you money. This chapter shows you how to streamline the left-brain activities.

Most advertisers approach AdWords optimization like a San Francisco gold prospector in 1848: with pick, axe, pan, and sieve; and no idea of where to look or what to look for. In AdWords, that approach consists of always looking for new keywords that might generate the profits you're hoping for. Leave the pick and axe method to your competitors. In this chapter, ...

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